An independent scientist’s observations on society, technology, energy, science and the environment. “Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.” – Carl Sagan

* Disclaimer: The site does not actually include any references to any actual real children hurt or harmed by nuclear energy.

Now, let’s see.

“To bring attention to this issue, to oppose Entergy’s attempts to relicense these dangerous reactors, this blog will be sending symbolic dead babies (dolls) out on a world tour by leaving them at various locations.”

So, unfortunately, you couldn’t find any actual babies hurt or killed or harmed by nuclear energy, for real, in the real world?

Apparently, whilst there’s no evidence of any kind that nuclear energy actually does hurt or harm or kill real babies in the real world, it however does symbolically kill babies.

My god, won’t anybody think of the symbolic children?

“First, it seems only fair that Andrea speak, since this Indian Point Dead Baby Tour is about them, the dolls, and who it is they represent in this battle.”

Oh, silly me. It’s about dolls? Indian Point kills dolls? Not actual real, living, human babies? It seems I was misled to believe that there are somehow actual living children being killed by Indian Point… I must have been mistaken.

I hate to break it to you like this, but they’re dolls. They’re not alive – if Indian Point is killing dolls, it must be pretty dangerous indeed… right?

First, some important news on our forward progress on this environmental direct action campaign:

3. Buried three dolls in the mulch in my backyard gardens in the hopes of giving them a bit of a different soiled look, and took some incredible photographs that I hope to load onto my hard drive, again on Sunday.

“The doll is so elegant, that it is going to be the doll shipped over to Elena in the Ukraine with the hope that she will agree to take it with her on her next motorcycle trip through Chernobyl’s fallout zone.”

On her website, Elena Filatova posted photographs of her alleged motorcycle trips in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 18 years after the power reactor disaster there. She mainly visited the virtually abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine.

Filatova took a large number of photographs of buildings, cottages, rusting carnival equipment, the interiors of schools and homes, and even a couple people who had since returned to the area. The photos are arranged in the form of a story presented as an account of a trip by a biker who got a permit to travel alone in the radiation zone. However, Chernobyl tour guides and tourists to Chernobyl have claimed that Filatova visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone only as part of an organized tour. Chernobyl tour guide Yuriy Tatarchuk recalls that Filatova “booked a tour, wore a leather biker jacket and posed for pictures.” Her website appeared soon after.

“There is no bigger myth within the nuclear energy than their claim that nuclear energy and commercial reactors are and environmentally friendly CO2 source of electricity. From the very beginning of the uranium fuel cycle, the massive creation of and dumping of CO2 into our environment begins, as well as a trail of far deadly contaminants. First, you have to get the uranium out of the ground…uranium mining is very equipment intensive, and the large pieces of equipment use MASSIVE amounts of fossil fuels. Further, it takes tons and tons of of ore containing trace amounts of uranium to get enough actual raw uranium to be of any use. This means said materials have to be carted to processing plants…again, said transportion of such vast quantities of these raw start up materials burn up vast amounts of carbon based fuels, adding to nuclear CO2 contributions to Global Warming.”

Yes, the mining of uranium, the enrichment of uranium, the construction of reactor infrastructure and so forth consumes energy, in just the same way as mining and refining bauxite into aluminium to construct massive wind turbines, along with the construction of the infrastructure itself, consumes large amounts of energy, often generated via relatively polluting energy sources, such as burning fossil fuels.

The proposed Woodlawn wind farm pro ject in New South Wales has also made available a detailed Environmental Impact Statement, in which greenhouse gas emissions are quantified on a whole-of-life-cycle basis.

Excluding values for wind farms that are significantly different from the proposed Woodlawn Wind Farm, GHG emissions on a life cycle basis range from 7-20 kg CO2e /MWh. This represents the GHG emissions from all activities, including the construction, transportation, assembly and operation of the turbines.

The idea that whole-of-life-cycle analysis can demonstrate that nuclear energy is unsustainable, both on an energy intensity basis and a greenhouse gas intensity basis, is based on a very limited set of highly dubious science, which has been widely rebutted, and found to be irreconcilable with the body of scientific literature established relating to the energy and greenhouse gas intensities of the nuclear fuel cycle.

I could go on, but this same bullshit argument has been done over, and over, and over, and over so many times… I’m sick of repeating myself.

“What lunacy sees the world wanting to build 2200 new nuclear reactors when the first 437 aging reactors have been such a dismal failure, and killed so many innocent people?”

Nuclear energy is the largest source of greenhouse gas free electricity in the world, and it is also the safest – one of the safest industrial enterprises in existence. Aside from Chernobyl, commercial nuclear power, operated safely in the Western world, has harmed or killed almost nobody – megawatt-hour for megawatt-hour, wind turbines, for example, are far more dangerous. I’d call that quite a success story, and I challenge anybody to provide credible evidence to the contrary, if they disagree.

“Look just under the surface of the commercial nuclear industry, and you find a trail of death…it is no coincedence that every county within 100 miles of a nuclear facility has elevated cancer rates when compared with counties outside of that 100 mile circle. Look at both wars in the Middle East (Desert Storm, and the Iraq War), and you find our soldiers coming home with strange illnesses, illnesses caused by their overexposure to depleted uranium. Already in Iraq, mothers are giving birth to children with horrible deformities, deformities caused by that same exposure to Depleted Uranium, and where does that Depleted Uranium come from? The production cycle employed to produce fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.”

Is there any credible physical evidence, any evidence of any kind, that “every county within 100 miles of a nuclear facility has elevated cancer rates when compared with counties outside of that 100 mile circle”?

What does the use of uranium munitions have to do with nuclear power? Nothing!

“That’s one of the big problems with the nuclear cycle…there is no such thing as the peaceful atom, no matter how you try to dress it up. Additionally, anywhere nuclear goes in all of its various forms, death is soon to follow. From its earliest days, even pre-dating the Manhattan Project, the exploration and exploitation of uranium has brought with it horrid deaths, devastating cancers, birth defects and destruction on a level almost unimaginable.”

Is there any evidence of any kind to support such claims in the real world?

“Going further, George Bush, our government, our military machine opposes Iran gaining the capability of enriching uranium for a very simple reason…with the capability of enriching said uranium for nuclear reactors, you gain as a part of the waste stream from enrichment operations the byproduct of Depleted Uranium.”

“You see, our Pentagon needs the commercial nuclear industry, and the infrastructure it takes to power it for its own evil purposes, including vast stockpiles of Depleted Uranium, which is used in numerous weaponry to make armour piercing ammunitions and war heads.”

Riiight. The uranium used in anti-tank kinetic penetrator munitions really doesn’t care what isotopic composition it is… Natural uranium, with no enrichment or depletion of particular nuclides, is perfectly usable for this purpose. Depleted uranium is not specifically required for this application at all.

“As our campaign moves along, we’ll share many of these photographs with our readers, but tonight, thought I would share a peek into the dolls long involvement in the Nuclear Industry, by introducing you to Priscilla and some of the members of her family who were forced, like many of our soldiers to endure nuclear bomb testing under the guise of the Friendly Atom and CHEAP ELECTRICITY.”

Exactly what, at all, does nuclear weapons testing have to do with generating electricity? Absolutely nothing.

“The tragic events surrounding the horrific aftermath of Japan’s 6.8 on the richter scale earthquake show us just how fragile and vulnerable nuclear reactors really are.”

The effects of last year’s earthquake on the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Japan actually demonstrate just how robust nuclear power plants are, when subjected to the terrible destructive power of an earthquake, something that is capable of razing entire cities.

This has got nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with Indian Point, Entergy, or nuclear energy at all.

In war, especially the most terrible of wars, as the second world war was, many civilians suffer terribly as a result of war – and civilians and soldiers alike suffer terrible thermal burns, as well as all sorts of other injuries even before the advent of nuclear weapons, and after the advent of nuclear weapons, with nuclear weapons, or without nuclear weapons.

I’d like to see a world without wars at all.

“incredibly heart wrenching photographs of the fallout area in and around Chernobyl”

This has got nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with Indian Point, Entergy, or nuclear energy at all, aside from the large-scale production of weapons-grade plutonium in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, with electricity being produced by the nuclear reactors as well, using extremely dangerous, unstable nuclear reactor technology, with no type of containment vessel around the nuclear reactor at all, that would never have been approved or licenced in the United States or anywhere else outside the Soviet Union, at any point in history.

5 Responses

All these liberals talking about dad babies from IPEC’s operation themselves favor abortion (calling it the “right to choose” – choose what, death?) and their policy has resulted inthe murder of 50 million babies since Roe v Wade made infanticide legal. We need to tell the truth. The liberals, the Dems and the anti-nukes (all one and the same) are the baby-murderers, NOT IPEC.

With regards to the above comment, as most of us know, it is entirely false to assume that all advocates of nuclear energy are right-wing Bush-supporting fundamentalist Christians, just as not all opponents of nuclear energy are far-left pot-smoking Marxists.